Dream Productions review – this joyous TV version of Inside Out is a Christmas miracle | Television

Tthe success of the first Inside Out movie in 2015 was so great that it must have taken countless acts of will and good faith to stop the forces that instantly toppled yet another and another, squeezing the franchise dry as quickly as possible. Instead, a sequel to the coming-of-age story of 11-year-old Riley and her increasingly complicated inner life (Joy, Anger, Fear, Disgust and Sadness, voiced by actors Amy Poehler, Lewis Black, Bill Hader, Mindy Kaling and Phyllis Smith) was first produced this year. Inside Out 2 introduced a teenage Riley struggling with the rise of Anxiety (Maya Hawke), Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser) and a small but scene-stealing dose of Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos). It was as charming, inventive, funny and endearing as the first and surpassed it at the box office.

All of which means you can approach the four-part spin-off Dream Productions , which takes place between the two films and is based in the studio that puts together Riley’s dreams, in one of two ways: with Poehlerseque glee ( more of that good so fast ! Yay!) or Hawkeish angst (oh no! Is the dam busted? Is the lure of the dollar too much and we’re getting inundated with all that shit they were dying to cash in with in the decade between films?).

Well, let the joy be unlimited! ‘It’s a Christmas miracle, but the quartet of tight 22-minute (apart from the finale, which comes in at 27) episodes is an unfailing delight. Packed as full of wit, wisdom and jokes for the whole family as the originals, they follow dream director Paula Persimmon (Paula Pell) as she tries to keep her work relevant as Riley (Kensington Tallman), now 12, outgrows those cupcakes/ unicorns/glitter confections that Paula has specialized in until now. Her biggest hit was the dream that convinced young Riley to give up her real-life dummy. But it is now (literally – dreams, like emotions in the movies, take the form of glowing colored balls in Paula’s world) starting to fade. On the warpath is Maya Rudolph as studio head Jean Dewberry (and with this and Paula Persimmon I finally realize what the franchise reminds me of: Jayne Fisher’s The Garden Gang series of Ladybird books. To anyone else who has scratched a similar if niche , itching – consider this my Christmas present to you).

Jean promotes Paula’s assistant director Janelle and instead pairs Paula with Xeni (Richard Ayoade, who has almost as much fun with the role as the writers have with him), a daydreaming director (“Scripts are cowards’ instruments! … There’s no camera like preferably only more! vision”) and, if you’re old enough to appreciate it, a pitch-perfect satire of a certain kind of indie presence in the industry. He wants to make their first dream together into one where Riley plays go fish with Death (“The symbolism will be very rich”). To get him out of the way while putting together Riley’s first-boyfriend dream, Paula makes him a second unit director (“Tear down the set! All we need are black frames and two fish bowls”), but suffice it to say that eventually they must learn to work together for the good of Riley and to stave off disaster at the hands of those who know her less well.

Dream Productions is full of the kind of detail that made the original material such a success. There’s Paula’s pet, Melatonin (stroke him enough and you’ll fall asleep). There is the hierarchy at work: dreams, daydreams, then threatened demotion to “brain speed”; the hopeful drawing Riley makes of her teenage self in class, who transforms into a proper character in her dreams; and the well-developed relationship between the dream world, the real world, and Riley’s waking inner world (the personified emotions from the first film all appear here, some of the actors who played them in the second).

Above all, it’s a generous, exuberant thing that feels born of a desire to give us all a treat – a gift rather than a franchise to be milked dry. It feels like someone wanted to make us happy instead of treating us like cash cows, and that the idea of ​​giving viewers a few hours of escapism and a happy ending was reason enough to get the old gang and some equally good new members together to do it. As I say – a Christmas miracle.